For comparison here's a link to another garden poem - "A View of My Garden," which was the first poem I completed after returning to poetry in 2012 (after a near thirty year break). I posted it on this blog on 18 January 2014.
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A disused kitchen crock was dumped
Upon a scrubby path
At garden’s rear, collecting there
The rain which flumped
From autumn’s clouds: hence, birds
Would to and fro for drink or bath:
Gruff gulls, meek pigeons, poised to scare,
Made weal or woe, like roughly-butted words,
Churning that crock with cries and merds.
Pre-Christmas, freezing air flowed in –
The prom and shingle banks
Were iced, the sea a sluggish lead.
A metalled skin
Of ice panelled the bowl
Which after fraught days burst its flanks,
Peeling the iced plug’s solid head:
The shards and shattered hulkings, winter’s toll,
Lay round like shipwrecks on a shoal.
Long days it took that plug to melt
Till January’s nought
Had come. I thought of the prom’s tribe
Of old – unsvelte,
Wheelchaired or zimmered, slow
To die, and like that ice-pig wrought
To dribs. Ah, Time’s unfriendly jibe:
Both ice and old thin to a slivered floe,
Then wind’s puff shakes them. And they go.
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© December 2022
